Conference Papers and Presentations

• Intlekofer, D.G., & Cutler, C. (2026, Jan. 8-11): You Sound Too Proper: Linguistic Policing in New York City English. American Dialect Society 2026.
• Intlekofer, D.G., & Cutler, C. (2024, Nov. 7-9): Vowel Mergers in the Melting Pot: Parental Influence and Multilingualism in New York City English. NWAV52; “Celebrating Variation in Multilingual Contexts.”
• Intlekofer, D.G., Cutler, C., & Dong, J. (2024, Nov. 7-9): You Guys, Y’all, or Youse? Multilingual, Ethnic, and Generational Influence on 2PP in New York City English. NWAV52; “Celebrating Variation in Multilingual Contexts.”
• Cutler, C., & Intlekofer, D.G. (2023, Oct. 13-15): NYC Metro Area Survey: language attitudes and the low back merger. NWAV51; “Variation in the World’s Languages.”
• Bishop, J., & Intlekofer, D.G. (2020). Lower Working Memory Capacity is Associated with Shorter Prosodic Phrases: Implications for Speech Production Planning. Proceedings of  Speech Prosody 10, 191-195.
• Bishop, J., & Intlekofer, D.G. (2020).  Is the intermediate phrase the basic unit of speech production planning? Evidence from individual differences. Poster session presented at LabPhon17, the biennial conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. [abstract]
• Intlekofer, D.G. & Bishop, J. (2016). The role of prosody in conditioning Tagalog o/u variation. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & N. Veilleux (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8, 105–108. [poster]

PhD Program Examinations

Dissertation: Talking to “You Guys,” “Y’all,” and Everyone Else: Variation and the Pragmatics of Audience Address in New York City Influencer Speech

This dissertation investigates second-person plural (2PP) variation, e.g., y’all, you guys, among NYC born and raised social media influencers. More recent work using perceptual data from the NYC Metro Area Language Survey (Intlekofer, Cutler, & Dong 2024) showed a clear change in apparent time: younger speakers favor y’all and you guys while older speakers are more likely to use you and youse. You guys emerged as the most prevalent form across ethnic groups, while y’all showed strong preference among Black, Latino, and Asian participants and lower preference among White and Jewish participants, who instead favored you. Youse, the form most associated with the stereotypical mid-century New Yorker persona (Labov 1966), is in decline.

The present study extends this work by turning to a usage based dataset to investigate what you guys and y’all are actually doing in public facing digital speech. The NYC Influencers Address Dataset, compiled in collaboration with students in my Sociolinguistics and New York City English courses at Hunter College, comprises 25 speakers and 1,578 tokens (703 pronominal 2PP and 875 vocative). The project uses a mixed methods approach: the quantitative analysis uses mixed effects logistic regression to test which social factors, including race/ethnicity, gender, age, borough, and genre, predict 2PP form choice. The discourse pragmatic analysis examines how the same forms function in real interaction: how you guys, y’all, chat, and guys shift between pronominal and vocative roles; how influencers construct named audiences (Nina Nation, chat, gang); and how genre shapes the ratio of vocatives to pronouns in streaming, beauty, lifestyle, and food content.

This work contributes to the literature by documenting an understudied area of variation, morphosyntactic variation, in contemporary New York City English, and by examining address as both a site of structured variation and a resource for interactional and persona work.

2nd Qualifying Exam: Prosodic conditioning: An instrumental production study of Tagalog u/o variation.  

This study draws on data collected from native Tagalog speakers in the NYC area to instrumentally investigate an attested optionality between the Tagalog back vowels u and o occurring in unsuffixed and suffixed reduplicated words, e.g., haluhalo ~ halohalo (ice dessert) and haluhaluin (to mix something very well), respectively.  The main goals of this study were to 1) investigate the phonetic properties of u and o in Tagalog reduplicants and 2) test for phonetic correlates of prosodic phrase structure (primarily duration), as a measure of prosodic structure independent from the segmental alternation. This instrumental production study was motivated by Zuraw’s (2009) characterization of the u~o optionality based on a written corpus; she proposed that the optionality can be accounted for by lexically-sensitive prosodic structure assignment. The results of this study provided partial support for Zuraw’s proposal: frequency effects weren’t found to be a predictor of the vowel variant; however, there was evidence of differences between prosodic structure that could account for the optionality. The current study added to the existing literature on variation, which lacks in describing reduplicants; it also provided new instrumental production data for Tagalog in general, but specifically for the optionality between the back vowels in reduplicants. [paper] [slides]

1st Qualifying Exam: Tagalog /u/-lowering: An instrumental study of spontaneous speech.

The standard characterization of Tagalog /u/-lowering as a phonological process triggered in the final syllable of a prosodic word fails to capture the entire picture of the domain in which lowering applies: problems arise, specifically, for cases in which optionality is apparently at issue. Kaufman (2007) argues for a prosodic structure for Tagalog hosts and clitics that utilizes recursion. Such a structure may provide the details needed to capture the variability observed in /u/-lowering. The current instrumental study, examining realizations of native Tagalog forms in spontaneous speech, tested predictions that follow from Kaufman’s hypothesized structure. The data provided evidence for the lowering process, but show that /u/ does not lower all the way to the mid vowel, contrary to the description in the literature. More crucially, the findings to some extent support the idea that previously unexplained variability has an account that depends on a two-way distinction among prosodic domains (although they are also not entirely incompatible with a three-way distinction, as per Kaufman’s analysis). The prosodic categories under investigation in the current study are the minimal prosodic word, the maximal prosodic word, and the phonological phrase. [paper]